Animating Light and Shade in 2D: With Animate and After Effects

1. Introduction: What I love the most about animation, is how it easily captures and conveys mood. There are so many dimensions to it. There's a bigger chance it will touch one of the viewers senses. Because a mood isn't only in the shapes and color, but it's intensified with audio and of course, motion. Hi, I'm Hannah, a freelance animator and graphic designer based in Sweden. This class is all about animation and expression. I'm going to show you some different tools and techniques that I use to make this sweeping light animation. I'll go through all the steps for making the moving shade and show you the effects that l use that give it a more textual look. What this class is going to focus on is how can you 2D animate shade, cast it by a moving light? There's no one right answer to this question. It all depends on which style you're going for. One popular method is adding a mask with a third edge to your shape layers and after effects. But if the shape I'm adding shade to is really complex one, I sometimes long after the freedom that the drawing tools give me. Where you can use your pen to more intuitively draw your shade. Shape layer animation, and in this case, using After Effects is great for some tasks, and frame-by-frame animation with Flash, Animate or Photoshop is way for some other tasks. That's why this class will take you through how to combine these tools so you can work more fluently, not compromising the design, and finally creates a expressive animation. This class is perfect for anyone who already knows a little bit of After Effects and who wants to explore some frame-by-frame animation. Also, for anyone who wants to learn a little bit of both worlds, some frame-by-frame and some After Effects, and how to produce two crafts together. By the end of this class, you'll have new insights when it comes to executing a certain design, and you'll be able to create unique 2D animations by combining different techniques. I'll see you in class. 2. Class Project: To begin this class, I want you to illustrate a character placed in a setting of your choice. Things to consider when doing this is, what do you want to happen in your scene and what story do you want to tell? Animation is always a time investment so be sure to make something that you'll be happy working on for a while. Think about what your light source is. Is it going to be in the scene, come from outside your scene and what will move? This is all up to you. The only requirement is that your character has a shape that will cast an uneven shade. Because if your character is a simple sphere, it would be much more convenient animating this straliant after effects. The whole point of this class is solving the problem of shade when your character has some bumps and defects by animating in frame-by-frame so you want to solve the problem with Animate or any 2D animation software that has a drawing tool. To finalize your class project, you'll frame-by-frame animate the light sweeping across your character. I'll show you my process in Animate step-by-step for making this animation. Then you'll import this animation to After Effects and place that in your scene. If you have a background, this is the time to compose it over the graphics. If it suits your scene, you'll add a shadow underneath the character and animate it with the Roughen Edges effects. Then you'll add some nice texture to your shade by track madding in Scribble effect. You'll give the background more depth with the Gradients and the CC Ball Action effect. The last lesson, you'll learn how to export your animation in a good format for sharing on social media like Instagram, and make sure to upload your work or a work in progress to your student project folder here on Skillshare, where me and fellow students can give you feedback on the project. The main assignment is animating a nice shade on your character. But that's at least what takes the longest to do. But if you'd rather focus on the last part of the lesson and get crazy with some effects and After Effects, that's fine too. I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. Basics in Animate: In this lesson and the next, I'm going to take you through some fundamental things you need to know and animate, to follow along my process in this class. You can skip the first two lessons if you're already familiar with the software or if you're using any other program that lets you animate frame by frame. In this lesson, I'm going to make a simple animation and it's not going to look very pretty. I encourage you to focus on the how and not so much on what my drawings looks like. Now, I've opened up animate and we're going to create a project. The format settings are good. If you'd like to have a different format in your render, you can always change the dimensions later in the process. Full HD is a good starting point. The only settings I'm going to change is the frame rate. I'll change that to 24, which is common for a traditional animation. I'll show you why 24 frames per second is a good rate when we see the timeline. I'll press "Create". Here we are. This is a timeline and this is the toolbar, and here's the stage. You can go here to zoom or use the shortcut Z and Click to zoom in and Alt Click to zoom out. This is a frame and the rest of the timeline is empty right now. This frame is 24th of a second, so to create more frames, you press "F5" on the keyboard, and here's the play head. Let's start by drawing something. I'll choose the brush tool, which looks like this. I have the pen pressure selected, but I won't mess around with these other buttons for this class, and you can change the brush size right here, but I'll leave that at 12 for now. It doesn't really matter for this exercise. Let's see one of the values and the animating at 24 frames per second. Let's have a dot that moves from here quickly over to here. Maybe not in a straight line, instead with this arc path. I'll control Z this and keep the first up. Going back to the timeline, I'll use the period key to go forward two frames. Comma key goes back, and I'll press "F7" on the keyboard to create a new empty key-frame. The dot isn't showing anymore because it's only on the first key-frame. If I turn on the onion skin, I can see the previous key-frame with similar capacity. This is a really helpful feature when animating frame by frame. I'll start the animation with this dot gathering some energy. It's going to go back a little before shooting off. This is also called anticipation. Then go forward two frames. Press "F7" and widen the onion skin so we can see the previous two frames. I'll draw an arc for the motion path. Press period "F7", and let's make it land here. Go forward F7 and draw the dots slightly above easing into this push. Go forward, two frames, F7, I'll widen the onion skin so I see the first dot, and then I can draw the second arc that takes the dot back to its original position. Luckily that was really precise. We're done. We can leave this and play it as a loop. I'm going to delete these extra frames by pressing "Shift F5". We'll loop this with the button right here. Let's press "Play" and see how it is. It's not a beautiful animation, but it looks okay. The dots going back and forth, and here's where we'll see the difference of animating on two's compared to one's. This is animating on two's and it looks the same as if we were animating at 12 frames per second. Although the timeline is set to 24 frames per second, what it does is it enables us to speed this part up. Leaving it as it is, could have a choppy field, because the arc is illustrating a really fast motion, and it would be nice if it animated more seamlessly. To make the motion feels smoother, we could delete one of the frames and animate the arc on a single key-frame. It would make the middle part twice as fast looking something like this. This might not play back right, and the screen-casts by finer looking pretty natural if we compare it to before. Just for contrast, let's try adding frames, so each arc is animating on three frames. You see this looks less natural and choppy. That's why animating at 24 frames per second has its advantages, because it lets you combine single key-frames for the really fast actions, with double key-frames were more efficient workflow. One more important feature we will use for our shade animation is the shortcut F6. It creates a new key-frame and it keeps the contents from whatever it was in the previous key-frame. Now this key-frame is a copy of the earlier key-frame, and I can add or reduce content from it. I'll erase some of this arc, which you can do with this selection tool as well. Now this line stays almost the same as the one prior to it, but it's getting shorter. This is what you should remember from this class. Add frames with F5, add key-frames with F6, and add empty key-frames with F7. Delete frames the same way, but holding down shift at the same time. View multiple frames with onions skin on, scroll back and forth in the timeline with a period and the comma key. That's all for this lesson, and I hope you feel more at home with animate. Now, let's import and prepare our illustration. 4. Preparing Your Artwork: In this lesson, I'm going to prepare an organized that illustration for animation. I'm going to recolor an edit bits and pieces. Then I'll create a silhouette based off the characters shaped to use for the shade. So this isn't a lesson on how to draw an animates, just the little go through of how the graphics behave and the software. I drew my character in Illustrator and that works well for importing into animates. All you need to do is drag it onto the stage and a little remain a vector shape if you want to, you get some options here. I would avoid importing it as a bitmap image since I had some final touches I want to do here an animate. Also because I'm going to create a stencil for the shade based on the character silhouette. Having it as an adjustable vector objects is going to make that a lot easier. Of course, you could draw your illustration and straight and animate instead and skips the importing part or you can trace over a hand-drawn image. There are plenty of good tutorials on how to draw and animates or flash if you like. Since I'm not going to be animating any character movement, I could have imported that illustration and any file format. But then I would have to trace the silhouette by hand and that would take more time than what we're going to do now. Now, I've noticed the character's hair is black, and I want to change that so that highlights will show and the hair animating the shade. So I'm going to change it to a lighter color, maybe Brown. As you can see, there is a bounding box around the shape. That means this is set as its own symbol, similar to a comp in After Effects. If I double-click, I'll enter the symbol and you can see there's a few layers and here, hiding some graphics which are revealed. If you unlock these layer, I won't do anything in here. If I double-click on the stage, I'll go back to the main scene. I'll right-click and choose break apart. That removes the symbol property and I'll remove this red bounding box. Instead, the illustration is divided into different objects and this is fine. Now, I can double-click the different parts and make the changes I want. So to change the hair color, I'll double-click on the hair and go down to the color selection and choose a rusty reddish color. Notice that my selection here is only a fill. So the strokes made an illustrator are separate objects. And soon you'll see that they aren't strokes anymore, but filled shapes lends that. Now, I want the hair in the back to have the same type of stroke as the rest of the character. So I'll make sure the stroke color is set to black and use the ink bottle tool to place that color on the edge of the hair. It was pure luck that the stroke with matched the rest of the strokes. It wasn't already, I'd set the width over here. I don't want this lines across right here. So I'll try to correct this. I'll double-click into this shape and selecting the Eraser tool e on your keyboard. While carefully remove this line, and I'll go to the other side and, and erase this line as well. With the direct selection tool, I can try to refine this line a bit by adjusting its anchor points and animate. You can delete anchor points without breaking the shape. I'll erase this part of the object behind that's showing through a little. You can adjust the shape with the selection tool B on your keyboard just by moving the cursor close to the edge, I can drag out and curve, that's just to fill that gap. There might be some small adjustments, but I think you have a good enough overview on how to edit your vector-based artwork and animate. Lastly, for this lesson, I'm going to make it filled in silhouette. That will be the base for us when animating the shade. This step is for anyone who's plan to make an animation with a lot of shadow like mine, where the shade will move from covering the whole character through revealing a little bit of light. I'll do this by duplicating the layer, which gives me two illustrations and lock the original layer and make the copy into a black silhouette. Select all the shapes, right-click and break apart and color the new shape to a black. Remember, we created a stroke for the hair. I'll just delete those jokes because I want the silhouette to be a solid shape. Now, you should have two layers. One containing your original illustration, and one was the filled copy, looking like a black silhouettes. Then we're ready for the next lesson, where we're going to plan out Tara light will move them scene. 5. Planning the Motion: Now it's time to create some guides and sketches that won't be shown in the final render. Just so that your lighting and shading will feel natural sweeping across your scene. If you skip the previous lessons, just make sure to have your illustration and the filled silhouettes of that illustration on two separate layers and animates. First of all, I'll name these layers. Double-click on the layer name, and I'll name this one girl, and this one shade. Let's create a new layer. Now, I'm going to plan out the light source, which direction the light is coming from, and the timing and speed that the light will travel in. I'll do this with the brush tool, and I want a color symbolizing light. I'll choose an orange. A nice thing about animates is that it lets you have multiple projects open at the same time. I'll go to this tab here and enter the finished project. I'm scrolling through the timeline so you can see what I'm planning to animate. I'm going to make the shadow do this. Light is coming from the left corner, traveling up to the top and disappearing in the right corner. I'll go back to my work in progress. The light will go something like this. Outline was turned on for some reason, I'll just change that here. I'll create a new layer and call it light source. You can't use space in your names and animate, I'll press underscore instead. I'll use a small brush for this three points, it's good. I'll put the first light source here. I'm drawing the light beam, so they cover their character going from the top edge to the bottom edge. I'll put some lines in between there. I want the light to go to the top, in about a second and down to the right corner in about a second. I'll expand the time up here to two seconds with the F5. Click and drag, and you can select multiple frames at once. I've created a empty key frame. Make sure that onion skin shows the previous frame, and I'll start drawing the light source when it's at the top. You can make a straight line by holding down shift. This isn't really aligned with a character, I'll move it a little to the left. I'm going to draw two more key positions for the light source on the side. I'll make an empty key frame and just select the layer beneath and plan this out a little bit. Let's put one there and one there, and that spread out pretty evenly. I'll lock this layer, I'm drawing my light as if it's coming from a spot or a little point that maybe you want yours come from a bigger area, or from further away spreading the light in a straighter angle, do this your way. This is just one way you can prepare for animating with an imaginary light. Now, I've finished one side and I can copy and paste the light sketches to the other side. You do this by selecting the frame you'd like to copy in the timeline. You can drag it over to wherever you want it. Now I need to flip this by right-clicking on the drawing and selecting "Transform" and flip horizontal. I'm holding down shift to move it in a straight horizontal line, and I'll place it so that the lines match the character. You can ignore the guide because it's not even very accurate anyway, I'll even hide it from now on. Now you can do the same for the rest of the key positions on the side. Now we have all the light source key positions. I want to spread out these key frames evenly because the light will move in a linear motion and the light will start showing two key frames, and so 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Let's have eight frames for each light position. Nudge these a bit move them around so each key frame holds for eight frames. I see here I'll have to expand the timeline a little bit for all the layers. The animation will be little longer than two seconds, which is no problem. Now they're all even and I have a good light source guide for the main key frames of the shade animation. I'll just expand these, and I can delete this guide layer from now on. Now, I'll make sure these are locked and I'll hide the shade layer, so we can see the character, and I'll create a new layer. Another thing you can do which is helpful for getting the shade right, it's getting to know your characters shape and volume. Select the brush tool again and pick any color and think about how your shape is formed. There might be some details that are illustrated already. They might have an impact on how the shade will behave. For my character, the light will probably highlight her collar bones before touching the rest of her chest. I'll start to draw a mesh to make the shape make sense in 3D. You don't need to be too picky here. Just make lines that you think could help as a guide. Maybe making lines like this that emphasize the arms being cylinders will help you get the shape right. Now, I have the right timing for the light's motion with seven key positions, and I have the right angle, so I know where light is coming from and I have a good understanding of the characters shape and volume. That means we're ready to animate the black silhouette into a moving shade. 6. Animating Pose-to-Pose: Now that I have a few different positions of a light, I'm ready to draw the shade in those key-frames. We'll be animating in so called pose-to-pose instead of straight ahead. Breaking down the animation process in different key positions, means we have more control over the pace and timing. The poses in this case means the different phases of the light. Now we have our guides and the volumes sketch. I won't look at the volume sketch very much, so I'll hide it for now, and I'll lock all the layers, but the shade layer. We're going to animate the shade by using the eraser tool, and erase parts of the field shape, like drawing bed in reverse. We'll start two frames in, having the first frames completely in shadow, I'll press F6 to make a new key-frame and draw the light coming from the side. The light won't be very strong at this point, like the sun when it's rising. I won't reveal much of the character right there. Then I'll jump a few key-frames ahead so we get to the top point, rather imagine the light to be the strongest. I've made this a pretty difficult task since I can't see the character underneath. I'll right-click on the layer and go to property, and I do this to change the layer's opacity so we can see the original drawing. The hair will have a lot of highlights at this point and the forehead too. But I'll keep a shadow beneath the hairline. Since I've designed the head, like a sphere, it will have some shade at the bottom, and eyes as well, and the nose will cast a shadow straight down in line with the light rays. Now I erased a little too much, so I'll select the brush tool and make sure it's set to the same color as the shade layer. I'll add some shade by drawing it in with the brush tool, the regular way. The sketch we did for the volume comes in handy now, now that we have to see the position of the collarbones. I'll keep some shade around here. Now I'll fill in the rest of the highlights super fast. Now we have it, the first and the top light position. After doing this, do the same for the two light positions in between. I'll make a key-frame with F6 and freestyle a bit. Make sure you stay in line with the lines we drew for the light. The onion skin will be hard to see at this point, since we have opacity on already. Plus it's a filled in shape. But that doesn't really matter for now, the onion skin will be more important to use when doing the in-betweens. Now the volume sketch is handy again, I'll turn it on so we can see where the collarbones are once again, just so we keep them in the same spot throughout the animation. This is how the key positions turned out for the light coming up from the left and going up to the top. Now it's time to double-check so the highlights fit in with the light's angles. I'll stop right here for this lesson and continue with the in-betweens for this side in the next lesson. Then I'll show you what you can do to save some time for the other side. That said another main key-frames are done, and it's time to draw in-betweens so it animates more seamlessly. 7. Inbetweening and Looping: It's time for the in-betweens and this is a quite repetitive part of the process. Put on your headphones listen to your favorite podcast or album and get into the workflow. After we're done with one side of the characters shade, we're going to copy and flip those frames and see how that turns out. Let's get started. This is what we have so far. If anything looks crazy at this point. This is the right time to change that since these key frames will be the base for the rest of the drawings. The light source guide won't help in this stage, so it's kept hidden. I'll make this layer transparent again. Now we'll set a key frame in the middle of the existing keyframes and start making the shade from this middle position and out. In the animation world, I guess you could call this a breakdown or a passing position but I don't feel like it's really necessary naming the different frames for linear motions that are like this. But we're in the passing position stage. Now I want to use the onion skin to see the keyframes around this frame but with so much filled area, it's hard to see the different drawings. Instead, I'll use the next button to the left called onion skin outlines. Then we'll have a slightly clearer view of the outlines of those already made drawings. Now back to the eraser tool and I'll start drawing with the goal of making the highlights outer edge placed right between the lines revealed with onions skin. Do the same thing in between the next two key frames and so on. You might need to use the brush tool again. Set the colors the same as the shade. Since the shade and highlights will move in different angles, the highlights won't just expand evenly from their center points. But mine needs to be re-shaped by both adding and subtracting. This was the first round of in-betweens, in this case, passing positions. It's always good to preview your work after each round of drawings to see if it looks right. Now we'll fill in the rest of the gaps. The ones that we can without a doubt call in-betweens, which is pretty much the same concept again, only now the difference between the earlier and the later frames aren't as big and you have a smaller margin to draw in. Now let's preview this and set it to fully opaque. Half of it is done and it's looking pretty smooth. Now I'm going to try something out. I'll select all of the finished frames and hold down alt and drag them over to the second half of the timeline. I've made a copy by scrolling through you can see that this looks like the light is just starting all over again. I need to select all the copied frames and right-click and choose reverse frames. Now the light is going from up to down by just highlighting the left side of the character. To make the light go all the way around, I'll have to select all the copied frames. Select the edit multiple frames button and make sure it covers all of the frames. Right-click on the character and choose flip horizontal. Now this looks a little bit strange, so I'll un select to the multiple frames button. Now the light goes all the way from the bottom left up to the top and down to the right side, like we want it. What's wrong now is that my characters ain't symmetrical. The second half of the shading is wrong in some places since she's sitting criss-cross and because how I've drawn the noses here. That means I'll have to repeat the animation process again or just correct all the wrongs in each frame. For a more efficient process use a design that's symmetrical and mirrored. You don't have to do the same animation for both sides. Before I do that, I'll make a few more keyframes for the middle part here, just so it doesn't look like the highlights are on freeze mode. On the lighters out of highest point. I copied the Silhouette from the first keyframe. I'll redraw the middle keyframe which makes a boiling effect for the middle part. I'll delete a few frames from here. Now I'll go in and correct the last half of the animation. You don't want to see this part. I'm just going to redraw the face and stomach and legs wherever they're really fit in with a symmetry. Now it looks like this. See I haven't been coherent with the ears and her shape. I'll just go in and do some retouching there. Now finally, the frame-by-frame part of this class is finished and the rest will be done in After Effects. Let's pack up and move into there. 8. Moving to AfterEffects: [MUSIC] It's time to publish this animation in a nice vector format that's compatible with After Effects. Now, I added a few frames in the end so the darkest moment holds for little longer. Make sure no layer has more frames than you want in your export. I'm going to export these two layers and I want them as separate files. That's why I'm hiding one of them. Then I'm going to publish Settings, and this is what we want to publish, an SWF file. JPEG quality can be set at its highest. The default is 80, and that will compress the file to a smaller size, so do whatever suits you. Then I'll open up the file location and save it to my desktop. I'll name it something that makes sense so it's easy for me to find later, and hit Publish. Then it's time to hide that layer and view the shade layer and go into the same thing again. I forgot to say that you need to make sure the Include Hidden Layers is unchecked. We don't want to see the light sketches in the export. I'll name this something else so it doesn't replace the other one. It's time to open up After Effects. This app looks a little bit different. Go to the Project panel and right-click and choose Import. Now navigate to your files. I'll select both of them and import. If you drag both of them over this icon, you'll create a new composition with both graphics on separate layers. I'll make a single comp and make sure the Sequence layers is unchecked. The layers are now in the wrong order, so I need to drag the top ones to the bottom. Press the Spacebar to preview the animation. Now we have a nice and transparent background. If you press Control or Command K, you'll open up the Composition settings. I just want to make sure the frame rate is set at 24 since we've been using that frame rate. Now you know how to work in between animate and After Effects. Now, we're ready to animate the rest. I'll explain why I've chosen to proceed in After Effects in the next lesson. 9. Motion in After Effects: Now in After Effects, I'll set up a simple scene and animate the character's position and the shadow moving beneath her. You can animate things like position and animates too. You can do everything in both programs but I find frame-by-frame excellent for morphing shapes, like a shade in highlights and After Effects is much more powerful for controlling your motion curves and adding style and effects. The timeline panel is selected and I can open up the com settings with "Control K". I'm just going to change the aspect ratio to square, a nice size for social media. I could do this later before render as well. I want these two layers to be parented. Now if I move one, the other one won't follow. I need to click the button called the pick whip and drag it to the layer I want parented. Now if I move that layer, that other one follows automatically. I want a nice blue sky in the background. I'll make that by creating a solid, by right-clicking and selecting it here. Choose whichever color you want and rename it to background. Then I want to make a ground. I could do it the same way or go and make it with the rectangle tool. We can change the fill right here. This is okay for now, maybe I'll change the colors later on by clicking the layer and pressing "Enter", I can rename it. I'm going to add an effect to the ground. You do this by going here and look for a roughen edges. Double-click on the effect as long as the right layer is selected and the effects values we'll show in this panel right here. I'm going to change the border to 28, the edge sharpness to 112, which I'm doing with up arrow and the scale to 440. Now you can see the shape is more organic and uneven. I'll drag this layer down. Now I'm going to animate the character's position. I'll select the parents layer and press "P" that will reveal the positions values. Press the stop watch and you've created a new keyframe. Go forward to the middle of the timeline and either change the character's position here by clicking and dragging. I'll undo. You can drag the graphic in the stage window as well. Either way, we'll create a new keyframe automatically. Now go to the end and select the first keyframe and copy and paste that to the present position. She is moving up and down and it loops. I want to soft her motion. I'll easily use these keyframes. Just select them all and press F9 and that makes the motion slow in and slow out of the keyframe. Now I want this to move even slower. I'm going to open up the composition settings again and set the duration to three seconds. Now you can expand the timeline a little bit by unchecking these buttons right here. Now there's empty space in the end and we need to expand the layers. The character layers have a fixed time from our export. I need to right click on the layer and go to time and choose freeze hold on last frame. Then it fills out the whole timeline. Just select the background layers, hold down Shift to select both and drag them by the edge to the end of the timeline. Now I'm going to select all the keyframes, hold Alt and drag from the last keyframe out to cover the entire timeline. That will slow the whole animation down a little bit. Seeing it play, I think I'm pretty happy with this motion. If you select all the layers and click U they will all collapse and everything looks tidier. Now I'll make a shadow under the character with ellipse tool. I can either create it right on the artboard with the cursor or double-click the button and it will make a centered ellipse that you can reshape by pulling the edges. I'll just change the color to black. I'll name this shadow and place it further down on the layers. The anchor point is set to the middle of a artboard, so you can center it to the shape by control clicking the pen behind tool right here. I'll just drag this down a little bit to re-position it. This will animate too. I'll look for the timing when the light is at its top point and I'll create a keyframe there, where the shadow will be placed right beneath the person. The next keyframe will be set at the very beginning for the shade animation. I'll move the shadow to the right. Then the same for the left side. Let's play this. I don't actually need a key frame for the middle since it's just passing that part but it doesn't seem to hurt the motion right now, so I'll keep it for this lesson. The last thing I want to do for the shadow, is make it look like it's sweeping over an uneven surface, since we made the ground a little rougher. I'm adding a liquid effect. This time I'm dragging the effect onto the layer. Now I'm hiding the layers beneath so we can see the shadow more clearly. I'll select the smudge tool, which works similar to the same tool in Photoshop. Now I'll draw in some bumps. But now that we're working with motion, it won't only smudge the shape but it'll smudge the shape in that spot or that timing of the motion path. I'm just clicking and dragging for some subtle curves. I'll have to scroll through the timeline to smudge all along the motion path. Let's play this. There it is you see a shadow sweeping across a uneven surface. Most of the motion is done but how about some extra style and details? 10. Scribble Effect: In the next two lessons, I'm going to add some effects to the animation to give it a much feel and be more pleasing to the eye. So let's start by adding a texture to the shade. Let's begin with an effect on the character's shadow. Create a new solid. The color doesn't matter, and I'll name it texture. Go to the shape tool and drag it over the new solid, and it will make a mask which we need for the effect we're going to be using at the scribble effect. Now go to the shade layer and make sure you see the track map parameter. If you can't see it, you can switch the mode right here at the toggle button. Now click on the arrow and choose Alpha inverted mat. The effect is only shown inside of the shape. You see how it gives a comic book drawing effect on the shaded area. I'm going to change some of the values on this effects to make it more subtle. I can just click on the number and change the value with up and down key. I'll make a smaller stroke and just change the percentage of these different values to whatever I prefer this time. There's no magic formula. That all has to do with your own taste or else whatever you think looks good. Let's see what this looks like. Now I'm going to animate this effect with the end parameter. The effect appears and vanishes as the light sweeps across. I'll start at zero, click the stopwatch to make a key, then move the play head to where the light is at its top point and change it to 100. Then here in the middle, I'll make 100 percent hold for a few primes, then go to the end and set it to zero again. Now the scribble effect isn't visible when the character is completely shaded. Now a small detail. I want the scribble to change its angle at the middle point. So I need to go to the angle value and I'll set a key frame at 60 degrees. Then I'll set a key frame a few frames forward and change it to 120 degrees. This makes the scribble lines follow the same angle as the light. It's barely noticeable, but I like the look of it. I'm going to place the same effect to the shadow moving beneath the character. I can do that by copying the effect we just made and paste it onto the shadow layer. Make sure the play head is at the very beginning of the timeline, then go to the scribble effects and the texture layer. Copy the effect with Control C and go to the shadow layer and paste it with Control V. The effect can't be viewed unless it's on a mask. So I'll go to the shape tool, make sure the tool create mask is checked and have the mask cover the shadow. Now, those are the effect on set. It's a mask one. Now the fact is visible, but it doesn't look like we want it to. I'm changing the color to black and scrolling down and choosing reveal original image. Now this way of placing the effect is inverted to the last method, so we have to change the values if you want it to look similar to the shape, texture. I did it this way now just to show you that there's usually multiple ways we can make and use effects and after effects. Let's see how this turned out. I like how it looks. I like that it dissolves when exiting the scene like the threads are untangling. Now we are done animating and texturing the shade, and we'll move on to the background. 11. Last Touches: Lastly for that animation, let's give it a name setting by adding some stories and moving backgrounds texture. I made some small changes and the background color. Don't mind that, I'm starting by creating a new solid. This is going to be the layer for the solids. I'll choose a white color. I'll name it stars and click "Okay". Select the layer and go to effects. I'm looking for a CC ball action. I've already discovered which values I want here. I'll, set the scatter to 520 and the size to eight. Now I'll place this layer behind the ground layer, so it looks like the stars are in the sky. Now I want an effect on this effects like a double effect. I'll make a new solid and name it fractal noise and add effects with that same name to this new layer. This layer is going to be a map for the star layer hiding and showing the size depending on the brightness of the area. I don't know if I'm being clear enough that you'll see what I mean in a moment. I've already decided some values that will give me the look that I'm going for. In this case that's my contrast. A little bigger scale and some more blur. Now this is just a still image, but I want it to move. I'm going to animate the evolution and move the play head to the beginning of the timeline and set a new key frame, then go to the end and type in three cycles. The fractal noise is moving, but it's not looping seamlessly. Tablet do that, I need to go to the evolution options and check the cycle evolution. Now you can't see when it starts and when it ends, which is a good thing. Go down to the storage layer and set the track matte luma. Now you can see what it does. It makes the stars twinkle a little bit. By duplicating this two layers, I can make a nice sky texture by just changing some values and the existing effect. This time I want the spouse to be more dense. This effect is a little unpredictable. Maybe I have to have the size value higher, even if I don't want these spots to appear bigger. All the parameters impact each other? Just try a few different things and see what works for you. Maybe even resizing the solid will make a difference of your liking. To make sure the motion feels more dynamic, I'll make sure the fractal noise for this layer is different from the previous effect layer. I'll have a lesser contrast and scale it up even more. I'll have it animate a little slower. I'll set the evolution to two cycles instead of three. Now I'm happy was how this is playing, and I want it to be softer and less obvious, so lower the opacity. I want an even more soft version of the effect to show on the whole background. I'm duplicating these layers, leaving the new ones to above the ground layer. I'll change some values again. The fractal noise layer, I'm checking invert, it doesn't just adds to the previous effect. This one will be even more transparent. It's time to make the whole scene get lighter and darker in sync with the shade animation. Start by duplicating the background layer, selecting the bottom layer and going to the layer settings and making it black. On the blue background layer, I'm going to change the opacity. Animates from very transparent to less transparent at the middle of an animation. I'm setting the first key frame to 16, and then I'll go somewhere around here and set it to something higher, maybe above 60. Then the last key frame will be 16 as well. Just like the first one, so at loops, now do a similar thing with the ground. Duplicate it and rename the new layer to ground gradients. I'm adding a gradient ramp to it, here in the Effects menu. Changing the light color to a blue that fits in with our seen, go to the middle of the animation and clicks the stopwatch for the start of the ramp. I will move starting point closer to the ground so that the gradient is more visible. I'll press the stop watch for the end of the ramp two. I am to the beginning and repositioning the start and endpoints. They make sense for the direction of the light. I need to do the same for the end of the animation. At the very end I'm copying and pasting the first key frame is so that everything loops. I don't think this looks very naturally yet, I'm going to use the same animating transparency as for the background. I can just copy those key frames and paste them into this layer, or I'll do it manually with a little bit different values. Lastly, let's add a finishing touch that is usually used in after effects, the fixed banding. If the gradient appears to look like it has stripes of different tones instead of a soft gradual color transition. I'm adding a new adjustment layer the same way as you create a new solid. I'll drag this up to the top, and I'm going to add a noise effects and set the value to five. You might not see much here, but it looks a little softer and a little greener as well. I just want this to fix the gradient, so I'll drag it down to above the ground. Now the animation is done and all we need to do is export. 12. Exporting: This is a short lesson on how to exploit the video. Start by going to the composition tab in the menu. I usually want to export with Adobe Media Encoder because it gives you more control over your export settings. I'll press "Add" to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Here inside Media Encoder, I usually only open presets because in there you can change pretty much everything that's relevant. I'll keep it at H.264, that's a common compression for animation. I usually don't change this, but it's important to know where you're saving it. So go into Save As, you see here that Media Encoder creates a new Adobe Media Encoder, AME folder, where it puts the renders. That could save you a few seconds, but I usually make my own render folder. If you want new dimensions on your export, you can change that here. I'll make the Canvas a little more Rectangle like bars are now shown on the top and bottom edge. I want to remove this and then I'm going to go to source scaling and choose scale to fill. I recommend you rescale like this straight and After Effects so you don't risk losing quality. I will go and undo this scaling. You could check this button, maximum render quality. It sounds like something you'd want to check, but the truth is that usually slows down your render time and it doesn't make a big difference in the quality. I checked it now because it's a tech I have heard in the video is short, so it will be fast render anyway. Go to the green play button and press it, and now it's rendering. This is how it turned out. Now, you have a video and a good format for uploading to social media and sharing here in your project folder. 13. You did it!: I hope this class give you a clear understanding of the different uses of animates in After Effects., and that you are more comfortable, and inspired, and mating shade and details in your own work. We've planned out timing and motion, animated frame by frame, and animated with shape layers. We've added effects and there's plenty of important things that this class didn't cover. So for educating yourself further than this area, consider looking into the concepting phase of animation like storyboarding, and the 12 principles of animation like squash and stretch. There's an infinite amount of expressions, effects, and features in these softwares to dig deeper into. I hope you enjoy this class and that I get to see your class project.